Where someone attempts to invalidate anything that’s problematic to their narrative and/or would trigger cognitive dissonance. Conspiracy theorists do this a lot, but so do your garden-variety bigot: when you’re outed as a drug addict, anyone can literally accuse you of anything, because no matter what you say or how stupid the accusation is, “junkies will do or say anything for dope,” “well of course junkies lie,” and “maybe you don’t remember because you were tweaking hard.”
The term that comes to mind would be “reductionism” but it’s not really a fallacy, it’s more of a path of least resistance. Marxism could be accused of reductionism because everything is seen through the lens of class struggle. And tbh, fair enough, if you successfully understand the fundamental structure of something you can absolutely “reduce” everything to that and get a lot of things right.
However in the example you mentioned, the bigot is denying the complexity and agency of a person. It’s not about arguments anymore, because somebody is actively dehumanising somebody else and they found one weak point to justify it all. In this case they’re no debate to be had, either you can remind the bigot they are talking about someone with consciousness and agency or you tell them to fuck off and leave them in their sad little hateful life
I think that it’s unfair to view Marxism as reductionist in that manner, which is why we have the phrase “class reductionism,” though simultaneously it does get abused sometimes. Obviously Marx’s beliefs did not reflect such a thing, or else why would he have entrusted so much to Engels? There’s a huge difference between saying “X has a heavy systemic bias toward Y” versus “X is usually Y” versus “X is Y”. Reductionism is that last one, because the problem isn’t acknowledging that something is often but not always the case (it’s okay to have heuristics), it’s simplifying things to eliminate other factors and exceptions and so on.
I think you’re mostly right, there’s just a nuance between the “class reductionism” which is wrong because it means disregarding other struggles entirely and “historical materialism reduces History to class struggle” which shouldn’t be read as an insult to Marxist science
Thing is, we got to find an effective way of encompassing History to analyse it or we’re going to get lost in so many details it will lead to stagnation, it’s okay to use reduction in that case, it’s on board with the philosophy of action and change that characterize Marxism
For example, it’s not wrong to say “Marxism doesn’t account for how psychology affects History” but it’s also totally liberal wanking because we won’t achieve anything by psychoanalyzing every goddamn person in the world because taking any action
My point is, reductionism isn’t technically bad, it’s bad when you use it wrong